Annuals, summer's brightest stars

Two kinds of petunias and blue lobelia in a hanging basket. — Proven Winners

Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer and it’s time to get in gear for warm-weather living. You’ve put away the woolens and found your Hawaiian shirt, right? Well, it’s time to dress your home for summer, too, and nothing does it better than bright annual flowers that will carry you through to Labor Day with non-stop bloom.

Annuals are plants that complete their life cycle in a single season. They won’t come back next spring, like the more expensive perennials, but they’re cheap and generally trouble-free, ideal for quick effects and lavish plantings. Be bold — this isn’t a long-term commitment but an opportunity for experiment, and you have no one to please but yourself.

A row of hanging baskets swinging from the eaves of your porch, pots of colorful blossoms stationed around the patio or broad swaths of flowers along the path to your front door will set you up for the season.You don’t have to have a seriously green thumb or invest days of hard work to pull it off. With a little planning, you can have a knock-out display that won’t make you sweat over garden maintenance when temperatures hit the top of the thermometer.

First, be sure to choose plants that suit your situation. Most annual flowers want sun, and lots of it. Favorites like marigolds, petunias, geraniums and zinnias need at least six hours of direct sunlight to perform well. But those shady nooks don’t have to go barren. Choose begonias, variegated caladiums, fragrant nicotiana or that classy old reliable, impatiens.

If you believe current predictions, we may be in for summer hotter than normal with lighter than normal rainfall. This may be the year to seek out drought-resistant species to anchor your plantings.

Ornamental salvias, low-growing moss rose (Portulaca), rosy verbenas, spider flower (Cleome) and blue fan flower (Scaevola) may not laugh at endless, blistering, dry days. But, being adapted to just such conditions, they will have the stamina to make it through with less help from you and your watering can.

Nothing makes tending garden beds easier than providing irrigation at the start. Wind a soaker hose through your border before planting (you can peg it down with "u"-shaped lengths of stiff wire), and cover it with mulch, which you’ll also want to tuck around those tender transplants. Watering the entire bed will be as easy as turning on the outdoor faucet, to which you can attach a simple timer for completely trouble-free watering.

Planting annuals thickly, a little closer than recommended, will also help keep down weeds and shade the soil so shallow roots don’t bake. Don’t be skimpy with your plantings in any event; a row of marigolds lined up like little soldiers is better than nothing, but will never have the impact of a lush, overflowing bed planted with a generous hand.

Coleus and caladium brighten a shady nook. — Proven Winners

By all means, plant a vine or two to clamber up a trellis or conceal the mailbox post. Perennial vines like clematis, climbing hydrangea and wisteria are notorious for taking their sweet time establishing themselves: The first season they sleep, the second season they creep, the third season they leap. Put in one of these for long-term enjoyment, but dress that skimpily clad trellis with a second, annual vine that will put on a satisfying show this year.

Good choices are the ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glory, the ferny cypress vine and the seductive moon flower vine, which opens its fragrant, white flowers after the sun goes down. Scarlet runner bean and hyacinth bean vine (Dolichus lablab) will not only give you lush foliage, but edible pods as well. Sweet potato vine won’t feed you, but will offer a bounty of striking foliage in chartreuse, deep purple, or variegated white, green and pink.

Don’t forget to grow some flowers for the vase. A small patch of ground can become a cutting garden producing a crop of bright bouquets for the table. Good choices here include annual (China) asters, tall snapdragons, plump zinnias, care-free cosmos, pin cushion flower (Scabiosa) and larkspur, all of which will give you armloads of flowers until frost.

Live large, and plant something outsized. You can amaze the neighbors with a 14-foot-tall sunflower, the tropical-looking elephant’s ear (Colocasia esculenta) with immense leaves, or a giant canna that can top out at 6 to 8 feet. Kids, by the way, find these monsters irresistible.

Whatever annuals you plant, bear in mind the two secrets of successful culture: regular fertilization and deadheading, or removing spent flowers.

Annuals grow at an accelerated pace, and benefit from a constant supply of nutrients. Apply weekly or bi-monthly doses of a fertilizer solution that provides a balanced meal, or mix a slow-release fertilizer into the soil before planting.

Removing spent flowers aborts the plant’s natural inclination to set seed — and when that happens, flower production will fall off. Pinch off not only the petals, but the potential seed pods immediately below; nipping back to the next set of branching stems or leaves will promote the growth of new flowering shoots.

If your plants flag in the heat, get stringy and threadbare or are attacked by insects and disease, your can always replace them at mid-season - they will keep flowering until days shorten sometime in September. The beauty of annuals is the generosity of bloom during their peak season in the sun. Think of them as a temporary but essential pleasure.